In one of Kendall Square’s trophy buildings, a tech CEO was welcoming participants to a business gathering this month that was off-the-record to the media. One of his talking points was a pitch to other CEOs and nonprofit directors in the audience: If you need office space, let me know, because we’re not using most of ours.
This is a very strange time to be thinking about economic development. Nobody really knows what an office is for anymore, and nobody really knows how you incentivize companies to hire employees who live in this state versus remote employees who could live anywhere.
So, how do we meet the challenge of retaining talented workers and maintaining a vibrant business ecosystem — especially after several years of outmigration?
My hypothesis is that COVID and the rise of remote work changed something very important. After spending a century working on how to attract companies from other states or countries, or incentivize hometown companies to stay and grow, economic development in this new era is about making the case to individuals that your state is the best place to work, start a company, buy a house, or raise a family. It’s going to shift from being about convincing Hasbro, Lego, or GE to move a headquarters to your state, towards more of a mass-market campaign that reaches tens of thousands of people.
Massachusetts — and the rest of New England — is extremely well-positioned to win in this new era. But it’s going to require this strategic shift and much more coordination among the six states in our region. Most of them share similar problems: an aging population, a high cost of living, and a high rate of residents moving out.
Luckily, New England already plays host to an audience of tens of thousands of individuals who give the region a four-year test run: college students. We just tend to treat them like long-term tourists (or sometimes, noisy nuisances) who drop $300,000 or more on tuition rather than a crucial part of our economic future. And today, no one owns the project of building a bridge between campuses and the business community.
Here are five things we should start doing immediately. Who’s the “we”? Not just the states’ economic development bureaucracies, which move slowly, but chambers of commerce, business associations, and career offices at universities.
First, we need a data dashboard. How have we been doing at keeping college graduates in the region, and are we improving that over time? In my view, there’s a big benefit to a Boston College alum who decides to stay in Rhode Island or New Hampshire versus moving to New York or Florida, because they’re likely still spending money in the region, traveling in the region, staying in touch with their alma mater, and potentially recruiting interns or full-time hires here. Schools tend to know where their alumni live, but let’s put the data in one central place.
Second, each state should hold a high-profile “welcome” event for incoming college freshmen. Think concerts, movie screenings, food representatives of the state — and booths for companies that want to hire college students as interns or new employees. The vibe should be more “Big E” than a job fair, but it’d provide a chance for freshmen to experience a little life off-campus, and get a sense of the types of companies that might want to hire them after graduation. Massachusetts has so many colleges that we might want to throw three parties: one in Boston, one in Worcester, and one in Amherst.
Third is what I’d call “Startup Summer” — Startup Summer Portland, Startup Summer Boston, Startup Summer Providence, and any other city that wants to fill some empty office space over the summer months. The idea? Free office space for 25 startup teams that want to test out an idea over the course of the summer. Bring in three experienced mentors each week to meet with the teams and serve up feedback on their progress. Ask universities and venture capital firms to split the cost of running the program and promote the heck out of which schools get the most startups accepted into each city’s program.
College students are increasingly entrepreneurial, and this would help them build more ties locally, and meet investors, which might help keep them and their businesses rooted here. Some schools, including Tufts and MIT, already fund summer internships with startups. But let’s go even further.
Fourth is getting more universities to follow Northeastern’s lead and encourage students to participate in extended co-op programs as part of their degrees. Companies want student employees to stay longer than a semester, so they can really contribute to a project or department — so much so that at a recent workshop I was moderating, one participant said that states should threaten universities with paying taxes unless they create co-op programs. (I don’t know that we need to resort to threats, but let’s expose more students to actual work at the companies that surround our colleges and universities.)
Fifth, we need to market and communicate with college students in ways that grab their attention. That includes a heavy dose of social media and a website cataloging the incredible resources we’ve got for students — from internship databases to startup accelerator programs to volunteering opportunities to hackathons, where teams seek to build a working prototype over the course of a day or two. As an example, this spring, Yale ran a quantum computing hackathon that attracted students from University of Connecticut, Northeastern University, and more than 20 other schools. And in September, Startup Boston Week had a dedicated track of sessions especially for students.
I’d also love to see every startup incubator and “anchor” employer (companies like Timberland in New Hampshire or IBM in Vermont) organize at least one event a year that focuses on bringing in college students. A good, ambitious goal would be to get every college student to participate in one off-campus event a year, either at another college or in the business community.
“While fostering connections between universities and the innovation ecosystem is crucial, it typically falls outside anyone’s formal job description or budget,” says Tim Miano, a staffer who recently left MIT, where he’d helped launch a cross-university mixer for student innovators. Miano highlights the problem that such initiatives require “lasting infrastructures,” which don’t yet exist, supported by universities rather than individual employees.
Cait Brumme, CEO of the MassChallenge accelerator, believes there’s a big opportunity to better make the case to students that staying in Boston — or other New England cities — can be “both smart and cool.” But she sees the need for some new “coordination function to set some goals and try a few things at scale, versus institution-by-institution, which is how I believe it is happening today.” In other words, some entity whose job is to build a bridge between campuses and the business community that will last for decades.
New England has plenty of problems to tackle, starting with the lack of affordable housing in our biggest cities. But this is a great place to launch a career, or a company, and we’ve been underselling ourselves for too long. As we move further into the post-COVID era of economic development, let’s change that.